We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. "To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but (...) obligatory." At OOO's heart is the idea that objects--whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human, or non-human--are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out OOO's history, ideas, and impact, taking in art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. From Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, and videogames to Dadaism, Voltaire, and string theory, this book will change the way you understand everything. (shrink)

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)

Professor Arda Denkel argues here that objects are nothing more than bundles of properties. From this point of view he tackles some central questions of ontology: how is an object distinct from others; how does it remain the same while it changes through time? A second contention is that properties are particular entities restricted to the objects they inhabit. The appearance that they exist generally, in a multitude of things, is due to the way we conceptualize them. Other problems (...) dealt with include how objects bear similarities by belonging to the same kinds, and how change in them is caused. Denkel defends a thoroughgoing particularism and offers purely qualitative accounts of individuation, identity, essences and matter. Throughout, the main alternative positions are surveyed, and the relevant historical background is traced. (shrink)

Object files are mental representations that enable perceptual systems to keep track of objects as numerically the same. How is their reference fixed? A prominent approach, championed by Zenon Pylyshyn and John Campbell, makes room for a non-satisfactional use of properties to fix reference. This maneuver has enabled them to reconcile a singularist view of reference with the intuition that properties must play a role in reference fixing. This paper examines Campbell’s influential defense of this strategy. After criticizing it, (...) a new approach is sketched. The alternative view introduces representational contents to explain perceptual individuation. After arguing that those contents are not satisfactional, it is concluded that there is room for a third view of reference fixing that does not fit into the singularist/descriptivist dichotomy. (shrink)

Research on human infants has begun to shed light on early-developing processes for segmenting perceptual arrays into objects. Infants appear to perceive objects by analyzing three-dimensional surface arrangements and motions. Their perception does not accord with a general tendency to maximize figural goodness or to attend to nonaccidental geometric relations in visual arrays. Object perception does accord with principles governing the motions of material bodies: Infants divide perceptual arrays into units that move as connected wholes, that move separately from (...) one another, that tend to maintain their size and shape over motion, and that tend to act upon each other only on contact. These findings suggest that o general representation of object unity and boundaries is interposed between representations of surfaces and representations of objects of familiar kinds. The processes that construct this representation may be related to processes of physical reasoning. (shrink)

This article argues that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. It clarifies the nature of bodily awareness, categorises the different types of body-relative information, and rejects the claim that we can have a sense of ownership of our own bodies. It explores how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness and highlights the importance of certain forms of bodily awareness that share an important epistemological property with (...) canonical forms of self-consciousness such as introspection. (shrink)

There have been several criticisms of Object-Oriented Ontology from the political Left. Perhaps the most frequent one has been that OOO’s aspiration to speak of objects apart from all their relations runs afoul of Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism.” The main purpose of this article is to show that even a cursory reading of the sections on commodity in Marx’s Capital does not support such an accusation. For Marx, the sphere of entities that are not commodities is actually quite (...) wide, including all the beings of nature not subject to exchange, as well as bartered goods, and tithes and rents paid in kind to feudal lords. In short, the theory of commodity fetishism is a theory of v a l u e, not an anti-realist theory of b e i n g, and thus does not touch on OOO at all. In closing, I make some brief comments on Marx’s relation to Kantian formalism and to Heidegger’s famous account of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. (shrink)

Gallagher, S. 2003. Bodily self-awareness and object perception. _Theoria et Historia Scientiarum: International Journal for Interdisciplinary_ _Studies_, 7 (1) - in press.

In this short paper, I outline four philosophical arguments concerning the objects we perceive. These arguments build up to the conclusion that the objects of perceptual experience are material objects. I then show that the first three of these arguments parallel important psychological positions in vision science. Thus, (1) the notion of object used in Logical Atomism resembles the concept as it is defined in the Feature Integration Theory of Treisman and Gelade (1980). But (2) Frank Jackson's (1975) Many-Property (...) Problem leads to a substrate-quality structure for visual experience that corresponds to the structure of attended experience in Feature Integration Theory. A third philosophical argument (3) concerns the perception of movement. This argument culminates in the proposition that perceptual features are seen as belonging to material objects. There is a close resemblance between these objects and those of Zenon Pylyshyn's (1980) FINSTs. Finally, (4) I argue that material objects are the only substrates of multimodal perceptual experience. Perceptual psychology has yet to investigate this structure. (shrink)

. ACT, CONTENT, AND OBJECT OF THE PRESENTATION It is one of the best known positions of psychology, hardly contested by anyone, that every mental phenomenon ...

본 논문은 쫑카파(Tsong-kha-pa)의 저서 에 나타난 공성논증의 논파대상인 부정대상(dgag bya)을 고찰한다. 여기에서 그는 空性의 모순명제인 부정대상에 대한 이해가 없이는 공성에 대한 바른 견해를 얻을 수 없다라고 보기 때문에 자립논증파와 귀류논증파 두 학파간의 부정대상을 자세히 설명한다. 그 결과, 자립논증파에서는 심식에 현현함이 없이 대상 자체의 독립적 방식으로 주하는 것을 부정되어야 할 대상이라고 규정한다. 이에 반해, 귀류논증파에서는 언설분별의 識에 의지하지 않거나 그것에 의해 건립되지 않은 본래적 자성인 것을 我라고 하였고, 이를 부정대상이라고 지시하였다. 이 때, 제법이 심식에 의해 가립된 것이라는 점에서는 두 중관학파가 동일하지만, (...) 세속적으로는 자성을 갖는 존재를 인정하는가 아닌가라는 점에서 견해를 달리한다. 그러나 이와 같은 세속유에 대한 견해적 차이에도 불구하고 두 중관학파는 심식과 관련없이 존재하는 독립적 자성의 존재를 부정대상으로 보는 점에서는 유사하다. (shrink)

How do newborns learn to recognize objects? According to temporal learning models in computational neuroscience, the brain constructs object representations by extracting smoothly changing features from the environment. To date, however, it is unknown whether newborns depend on smoothly changing features to build invariant object representations. Here, we used an automated controlled-rearing method to examine whether visual experience with smoothly changing features facilitates the development of view-invariant object recognition in a newborn animal model—the domestic chick. When newborn (...) chicks were reared with a virtual object that moved smoothly over time, the chicks created view-invariant representations that were selective for object identity and tolerant to viewpoint changes. Conversely, when newborn chicks were reared with a temporally non-smooth object, the chicks developed less selectivity for identity features and less tolerance to viewpoint changes. These results provide evidence for a “smoothness constraint” on the development of invariant object recognition and indicate that newborns leverage the temporal smoothness of natural visual environments to build abstract mental models of objects. (shrink)

What makes an object the same persisting individual over time? Philosophers and psychologists have both grappled with this question, but from different perspectives—philosophers conceptually analyzing the criteria for object persistence, and psychologists exploring the mental mechanisms that lead us to experience the world in terms of persisting objects. It is striking that the same themes populate explorations of persistence in these two very different fields—e.g. the roles of spatiotemporal continuity, persistence through property change, and cohesion violations. Such similarities (...) may reflect an underlying connection, in that psychological mechanisms of object persistence (especially relevant parts of mid-level visual object processing) may serve to underlie the intuitions about persistence that fuel metaphysical theories. This would be a way for cognitive science to join these two disparate fields, helping to explain the possible origins and reliability of some metaphysical intuitions, and perhaps leading to philosophical progress. (shrink)

In The Principles of Mathematics, Russell writes: Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. This, then, is the widest word in the philosophical vocabulary. I shall use as synonymous with it the words unit, individual and entity. The first two emphasize the fact that every term is one, while the third is derived from the fact that every term has being, (...) i.e. is in some sense. A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term'. Now in this remark, a certain extremely general, topic-neutral use of ‘object’ is singled out, a use in which the expression is treated as equivalent to (equally neutral) uses of ‘term’, ‘entity’, ‘unit’, ‘individual’, and ‘thing’. In addition, a claim is made to the effect that the content of the expression, with its emphasis on one, is such as to be adequate to comprehend the sum-total of existence, to include whatever there may be. The paper addresses the question of what this claim means, and whether it might be true. (shrink)

Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of ‘law and society’, or ‘law in context’. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on ‘law itself’, on what Annelise Riles calls the ‘technicalities’ of law. How might the legal scholar be inspired by this approach? In this article, I explore (...) one possible way of approaching law after anthropology, which is to find within law’s own archive a set of resources for an analogous representation of law itself. Drawing on the historical scholarship of Yan Thomas, I suggest that the Roman conception of law as object offers an engaging counterpart to the anthropological take on law as a specific set of tools or, technicalities, or as a particular art of making relations. (shrink)

In this short review I address certain issues and predictions that arise from the position papers by Erteschik- Shir, and by Fox and Pesetsky. The two proposed analyses are radically different, so I have made no attempt to relate them in terms of their properties. In section 1 I discuss some underlying issues in the architecture of grammar assumed by Erteschik-Shir, and in section 2 I evaluate some of the predictions generated by Fox and Pesetsky’s approach. In section 3 I (...) draw some more general conclusions about what consequences Object Shift shows us concerning the organization of grammar, and the nature of grammatical principles. While my remarks mainly address problems or drawbacks that I see with the proposals in the two position papers, they both offer a stimulating account of OS and explore the wider implications of the natures of their enterprises, and deserve fuller consideration beyond the present venue, consideration that they will surely receive. (shrink)

The notion that visual attention can operate over visual objects in addition to spatial locations has recently received much empirical support, but there has been relatively little empirical consideration of what can count as an `object' in the ®rst place. We have investi- gated this question in the context of the multiple object tracking paradigm, in which subjects must track a number of independently and unpredictably moving identical items in a ®eld of identical distractors. What types of feature (...) clusters can be tracked in this manner? In other words, what counts as an `object' in this task? We investigated this question with a technique we call target merging: we alter tracking displays so that distinct target and distractor loca- tions appear perceptually to be parts of the same object by merging pairs of items (one target with one distractor) in various ways ± for example, by connecting item locations with a simple line segment, by drawing the convex hull of the two items, and so forth. The data show that target merging makes the tracking task far more dif®cult to varying degrees depending on exactly how the items are merged. The effect is perceptually salient, involving in some conditions a total destruction of subjects' capacity to track multiple items. These studies provide strong evidence for the object-based nature of tracking, con®rming that in some contexts attention must be allocated to objects rather than arbitrary collections of features. In addition, the results begin to reveal the types of spatially organized scene components that can be independently attended as a function of properties such as connectedness, part struc- ture, and other types of perceptual grouping. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this article the author analyzes the problem stated by Ingarden in his ontology: under what conditions can the subject−properties structure and the whole−parts structure coexist in one object? After the presentation of Ingarden’s doctrines concerning both structures, the author argues that for Ingarden a whole is nothing over and above a plurality of objects linked by relations. However, Ingarden was convinced that a compound object is not identical with a whole which is associated with it. Then the (...) author analyzes the difference between the two types of compound objects: higher-order objects and compound, primarily individual objects. The former are founded on parts while the latter are such that their parts are founded on them. Finally, the author considers Ingarden’s theory as an answer to the one–many problem. The author argues that Ingarden’s conception of a higher-order object cannot solve this problem, and he also points to some difficulties concerning primarily individual compound objects. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Why Worry about Future Generations?, Samuel Scheffler argues that we typically love humanity, and that this attachment gives us reasons to care about future generations. The paper explores this idea with an eye to understanding better the sense in which humanity is an object of attachment. The paper argues that the humanity we love should be understood in an enriched rather than a reductively biological sense, as a species that has historically sustained a complex set of cultural (...) and personal meanings. Caring about this object will lead us to be concerned about future generations. But these reasons of love should not be understood as reasons to be concerned directly about the fate of individual future people. The paper concludes with some reflections about the attachment-independent value of humanity in the enriched sense, distinguishing between relational and non-relational interpretations of this independent value. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OBJECT AND INTENTION IN MORAL JUDGMENTS ACCORDING TO AQUINAS JOHN FINNIS U'flkueTBity Oollege Unwersity of Oa:ford INTENTION IS OF END, choice is of means. A human aict ~s specified by (and s? is co.rrect:ly describe~ in terms of) its end. A human act IS specified by (and so Is correctly described in terms of) its object. An a:ct which is bad by reason of its object (...) cannot be justified by its end (its: good intention ). A human a:ct is specified by (and so is correctly described in iterms of) its intention.... Such a sequence of statements of St. Thomas ought to leave an impression of confusion. That impression would be heightened by the traditional representation of his analysis of acting in a schema of 12 terms signifying a sequence of psychological acts involved in willing and doing something. For in this analysis, intention seems to precede ·deliberating, judging, and choosing, and so, as deliberating, judging, and choosing often present themselves to consciousness distinctly, intention is presented in this analysis as if it were a distinct content of consciousness. When intention is so conceived, iit becomes possible to imagine that one can, so to speak, choose to direct (an) intention to or withhold it from the various aspects of one's chosen behavior, e.g. it.hose consequences which one foresees and welcomes or those one chooses to bring about onJ.y with regret. To some contemporary moralists, such approving or regretting of consequences is precisely what engages or disengages one's will and thus one's responsibility; what Christians or Jews used to regard as immoral can be uprightly done if done merely as a means to good ends and only with reluctance, I JOHN FINNIS regret, disapproval, i.e. if in no way approved or adopted as an end, i.e. if not really intended.1 Other modern moralists deny that one's responsibility for consequences of deliberate behavior can be so dependent on an inner ruct of intending (as distinct from the choosing and doing) ; they judge one responsible for everything one deliberately and with foresight causes.2 So they too reject the " doctrine " of double effect which Christian moralists had articulated as a development or codification of the elements of St. Thomas's discussion of self-defense, a disoussion whose first premise is that a human ad is specified (i.e. identified for the purposes of moral assessment) by its intention. Today there are other moralists again who combine the two foregoing lines of thought: they reject the doctrine of double effect as giving exaggernted importance to choice (means) over intention (end); one should take into account alil foreseeable consequences of one's chorce and ensure that it is likely to have a greater proportion of good than of bad consequences, and one must never approve (intend) any bad consequences -one may never deliberately cause them as ends hut only as means, means which one deliberwtely causes, not for their own sake, hut only for the sake of those proportionately greater good (or less bad) consequences which one does intend.8 1 Cf., e.g., Richard McCormick, S.J., "Medicaid and.Abortion," Theological Studies 45 (1984): 716-717. 2 Cf. Bruno Schueller, "The Double Effect in Catholic Thought: A Re· evaluation," in McCormick and Ramsey, Doimg Evil to Achieve Good (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1978), 191: "... 'intend as a means' and 'permit', when referring to a non-moral evil, denote exactly the same mental attitude." Schueller, "La moraliM des moyens," Recherches de Science Religieuse 68 (1980) : 211 (causilng moral evil is never justified, causing non-moral evils is justified in pursuit of non-moral good of corresponding importance); 221· 2: "pour tous les biens dont la possession contribue au bien-etre de l'homme... [q]uoi que l'on choisisse... les consequences negatives qui resultent du choix sont un pur moyen en vue des consequences positives qui en resultent." s Cf. K.-H. Peschke, "Tragfaehigkeit und Grenzen des Prinzips der Doppelwirkung," Studia Moralia 26 (1988): 110-112, where Peschke states the "principle of double effect" (which he ascribes to Catholic theology and attacks ) in terms not of what is directly or... (shrink)

The view that perceptual experience has representational content, or the content view, has recently been criticized by the defenders of the so-called object view. Part of the dispute, I claim here, is based on a lack of grasp of the notion of content. There is, however, a core of substantial disagreement. Once the substantial core is revealed, I aim to: (1) reject the arguments raised against the content view by Campbell (2002), Travis (2004), and Brewer (2006); (2) criticize Brewer’s (...) (2006, 2007, 2008, 2011) attempts to defend the object view; (3) refine Pautz’ (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) arguments against the object view, which mainly resort to the fact that it cannot account for the grounding role of hallucinatory experiences; (4) and finally adjudicate in favor of the content view and against the overestimation of the naïve intuition. (shrink)

We perceive a world of mind-independent macroscopic material objects such as stones, tables, trees, and animals. Our experience is the joint upshot of the way these things are and our route through them, along with the various relevant circumstances of perception; and it depends on the normal operation of our perceptual systems. How should we characterise our perceptual experience so as to respect its basis and explain its role in grounding empirical thought and knowledge? I offered an answer to this (...) question in Perception and its objects. Here I aim to clarify some of my central arguments and to develop and defend the position further in the light of subsequent critical discussion. (shrink)

A new method was devised to test object permanence in young infants. Fivemonth-old infants were habituated to a screen that moved back and forth through a 180-degree arc, in the manner of a drawbridge. After infants reached habituation, a box was centered behind the screen. Infants were shown two test events: a possible event and an impossible event. In the possible event, the screen stopped when it reached the occluded box; in the impossible event, the screen moved through the (...) space occupied by the box. The results indicated that infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event. This hnding suggested that infants (1) understood that the box continued to exist, in its same location, after it was occluded by the screen, and (2) expected the screen to stop against the occluded box and were surprised, or puzzled, when it failed to do so. A control experiment in which the box was placed next to the screen provided support for this interpretation of the results. Together, the results of these experiments indicate that, contrary to Piaget’s (1954) claims, infants as young as 5 months of age understand that objects continue to exist when occluded. The results, also indicate that 5-month-old infants realize that solid objects do not move through the space occupied by other solid objects. (shrink)